Intimate tablets: digital advocacy and post-feminist pharmaceuticals

Since the enormous commercial success of Viagra, launched by Pfizer in 1998, large pharmaceutical conglomerates have sought to produce an analogous drug for women with low sexual desire. On August 18 2015, Sprout Pharmaceuticals obtained approval from the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) for flibanserin, now marketed as Addyi. In the lead-up to the approval of Addyi, campaigns supporting the production of the drug were deployed through an extensive use of social and digital media platforms including Facebook and Twitter, which mobilised discourses of post-feminism to reconfigure narratives of intimacy to lobby the FDA. The lobbying for the approval of the tablet represents a unique instance of consumers reproducing discourses of medicalisation in order to demand gender equality. It strategically combines feminist rhetoric and digital media platforms to disseminate and coordinate such demands. The rhetoric of post-feminism constitutes both a reproduction of discourses of medicalisation and a challenge to medical orthodoxy. The success of the campaigns exemplifies a turn in the pharmaceutical industry where potential consumers are also producers of medical products, no longer passive but active agents in the commodification of pharmaceutical intimacy and the management of sexual desire.